The Last Open Road Read online

  "Yeah, they do," I agreed. "But they're sure all over the place in the corners."

  "You know, a chap once said if I ever saw what it looks like from the outside, I'd never get in the bloody thing again."

  We had a good laugh over that, and I must admit I felt pretty damn special, hanging around and shooting the breeze with an ex-fighter pilot/automobile racer the likes of Tommy Edwards.

  Right out of the blue, Big Ed asked if he could sit in Tommy's Allard. "By all means," Tommy told him. So Big Ed scrunched himself inside—ugh, scrape, grunt —and I swear Big Ed couldn't do much more than breathe once he got himself crammed behind the wheel. And shallow, at that. But you should've seen the light flickering up in his eyes as Big Ed glared out at the world through that little speedboat-style racing windscreen. Why, you could almost hear the old gears turning again under Big Ed's yellow Jaguar cap, and his fat Cuban stogie was damn near twirling between his teeth.

  After Tommy and Ronnie took off, Big Ed and me made our way over to the big victory celebration around Creighton Pendleton's first-place Ferrari. It looked just magnificent, glistening in the late-afternoon sun with heat waves still shimmering off it and the smell of crisp metal and roasted brake linings hanging in the air. Race people were milling all around it, laughing and joking and guzzling beers, and right in the middle of everything was Creighton himself: a tall, dark, cologne-ad type wearing powder blue Dunlop coveralls with CREIGHTON PENDELTON III embroidered above the breast pocket in silvery thread. Boy, did he ever look the part! He had perfect teeth and a Bermuda tan and wore his jet-black hair slicked back from his forehead like Rudy Valentino. A gaggle of well-wishers were pumping his hand and slapping him on the back—one right after the other—but he just stood there, nonchalant as can be, nodding and shrugging and every now and again flashing this knowing smile he kept on tap for special occasions. You could tell he got a lot of mileage out of that smile. Then the girl who rode with him on the victory lap—without a doubt the smoothest, sleekest, most thoroughbred specimen of a young woman I had ever seen—stepped out of the crowd, draped her arms around his neck, closed her eyes, and drew him down into a long, deep, lingering kiss with a whole lot of tongue in it.

  Wow!

  7: AUNT ROSAMARINA'S RACE SHOP

  IMAGINE MY surprise when I showed up at the Sinclair Monday morning and found Old Man Finzio in the process of throwing Cal Carrington's busted-up MG off the property. I guess Cal managed to get it hauled in late Sunday evening and then just sort of left it there—right in front of the overhead door!—without so much as a note or a phone number or anything. Naturally it wouldn't roll, what with the steering gear all bent to shit and the right-front brake drum scraping on the pavement, so the Old Man was hitching it up to his tow truck so he could drag it off to an alley someplace and ditch it. "Hey, Mr. Finzio," I yelled over, "where ya goin' with that customer's automobile?" See, we never worked on "people's cars" at the Sinclair. Oh, no. They were always "customers' automobiles."

  "This heap?" the Old Man grunted. "I thought mebbe I'd haul it over by the boneyard and see if they'd gimme ennything fer it."

  "You can't do that," I told him. "Why, that's a race car."

  "A race car? This piece of shit? Haw! You gotta be joking."

  "No, honest. It just had a little, er, a little racing accident, that's all."

  Old Man Finzio dug yet another mashed-up Camel out of his pocket and gave Cal's MG a thorough eyeballing. "Looks t'me like it's had itself a whole damn assortment of accidents. And none of 'em was particular little, either. . . . Say, who owns this shitbox, anyways?"

  "It belongs to, aah, Mister Carrington," I told him, "from over in Cedar Grove. Big Ed and me met him at Bridgehampton this weekend. Gee whiz, you shoulda seen him drive this thing. Until the wheel came off, anyway. . . ."

  "Hmm. I s'pect that slowed him down a mite, didn't it?"

  "Yeah. That and the hay bales. Anyhow, I told him to haul it over here so's we could fix it up for him."

  "Fix it?!" the Old Man snorted. "And just where in the hell didja plan t'start?" He took a hard drag on his cigarette. "Lissen t'me, sonny, the only thing this car needs is a decent burial." The Old Man thought that was pretty funny and started to laugh, but like always it turned into a monumental coughing fit (imagine a truckload of wet coal rattling down a rusty tin chute) and sometimes it got so bad you'd swear he was about to flop over dead right in front of you. Which is probably why Old Man Finzio worked so hard at not being amused.

  There was no question we had to do something with Cal's MG—we couldn't very well leave it blocking the entrance to the service bay— so we hitched it up and dragged it back behind the building, where the Old Man and me had to wrestle that heap around like a pair of dock-workers with a floor jack under the right front, and it didn't help any that the concrete turned to gravel right there so the damn thing kept trying to fall off on Old Man Finzio's toes. Needless to say, we were both worked into a pretty good lather by the time we got Cal's ratty TC snug up against the outside wall, and it didn't take any special genius to see that the Old Man was developing a very deep personal dislike for this particular MG. Not only had it been abandoned in front of his place of business, but it had since managed to scrape his knuckles, bang his knees, repeatedly attempted to crush his toes, and got him to wheezing and coughing so bad he sounded like the local Jaycees' spook house on Halloween. Like always, the Old Man simply lit himself up another fresh Camel to take care of it.

  Three whole days passed before Cal Carrington bothered to drop in and talk to Old Man Finzio about his car. He just tooled in out of the blue in his mom's new two-tone Packard, and immediately set a rookie world's record for pissing the Old Man off. I didn't have a watch on it, but I'd guess he got the job handled in thirty seconds flat. Cal just didn't see anything wrong with dumping his busted MG smack-dab in front of the service door, not calling for three days, and then expecting Old Man Finzio to drop whatever he was doing and devote his undivided attention to Cal's broken TC. I guess you could say Cal was maybe a little bit spoiled. Maybe more than a little, even.

  "Now see here, sonnyboy," the Old Man hissed, running his eyes over Cal's mom's new Packard, "we work fer a living around this here service station. We got things t'do, unnerstand?"

  "Yeah, sure," Cal said, not understanding one little bit. "All I wanna know is when my MG'll be ready."

  "Ready fer what? A decent burial?" The Old Man started to snigger again, and I was afraid he might go into one of his laughing/coughing/choking/gasping-for-air jags. But fortunately the joke wasn't so funny the second time around. "Now lissen here, sonnyboy," he said, taking a long, thoughtful drag on his cigarette, "if y'want, I can have my associate here"—the Old Man nodded in my direction—"write'cha up a estimate on that automobile of yers."

  "An estimate?" Cal gulped, flashing me one of those wide-eyed Judas looks.

  "That's right, sonnyboy, a estimate," the Old Man nodded, blowing a cloud of smoke in Cal's face. "An' I want you should check it over reeeal careful. Make sure it looks right t'ya, see. Sure wouldn't want fer there t'be no misunderstandings later. . . ."

  "Oh, of course not," Cal mumbled, swaying back on his heels.

  "An' then y'could mebbe give us, say, a little deposit on the parts?"

  "A d-deposit?" Cal stammered.

  "That's right, a deposit. You just check over that estimate real careful, then fork over a little earnest-money deposit t'cover the parts. That's when we'll get started on fixing yer car." The Old Man took a deep drag off his cigarette, savored it, and slowly exhaled. "You unnerstand?"

  "Uh, well, er, exactly how much of a deposit are you thinking of?" Cal wanted to know.

  Old Man Finzio looked Cal up and down, checking out his Ivy League clothes and Bass Weejun loafers. Then his eyes shifted to the new, two-tone Packard parked out by the pumps. "Oh, I dunno," the Old Man mused, rubbing the four-day growth of stubble on his chin, "how does, oh, say, a hunnert dollars sound."

&nb
sp; "A hundred dollars?!" Cal yelped. "Geez, mister, I, uh, never, um, that is, I never carry that much cash on me."

  "But you could git it, right?"

  "Oh, uh, s-sure I could. No problem. It's just that, well. . ."—Cal's eyes slipped down to the cuffs of the Old Man's coveralls—". . . that my, uh, assets aren't real, aah, liquid right now. . . ."

  Well, Old Man Finzio may have been just a grizzled old grease monkey from Passaic, but he sure as hell understood flat broke when he heard it. In any language. The Old Man raised up a tobacco-stained finger and waggled it under Cal's nose. "Now lissen here, sonnyboy. We ain't runnin' no charity benefit fer runny-nose rich kids around my service station. No siree. Way I figger it, y'owe me a dollar fifty fer storage already. An' that's not even countin' haulin' that wreck of yers around back. Normally, I charge two bucks just t'hitch up."

  You could tell Cal wasn't used to getting pushed around like that— especially by dirty-fingernail types like Old Man Finzio—and no question he was starting to get a little hot under the collar. Which of course was the worst thing he could do. "Now look here, mister," Cal growled with a steely new edge to his voice, "I don't think you understand. . . ."

  "Like HELL I don't!" the Old Man snapped, jumping out from behind the counter and jamming his chin squarely up into Cal's face, "It's you who don't unnerstand things, sonnyboy. Y'got till noon Sattiday t'come up with at least fifty bucks, or I'm draggin' that so-called auto mobile of yers t'the junkyard an' sellin' it fer scrap t'cover the storage an' towing charges."

  Cal's eyes flew open. "B-But you can't do that."

  "You just watch me, sonnyboy," the Old Man sneered, calmly putting a fresh match to the remaining half-inch stub of his latest Camel.

  And that, in a roundabout way, is how Cal Carrington's busted TC wound up just downstairs from my apartment in my Aunt Rosamarina's garage (at least after I lent Cal one of Big Ed's five-buck tips so's he could pay off Old Man Finzio's towing ransom). Now don't get me wrong, Calvin Wescott Carrington was a nice guy in a lot of ways, and I'd have to say we got to be really good friends. But to know Cal was to be owed by Cal, even though he came from more damn money than people like you and me ever see in a lifetime. As he told Old Man Finzio, his "assets" weren't always "liquid," and believe me, that's the way they stayed for as long as I knew him. And on those rare occasions when Cal did happen to be carrying a little folding money (which happened every now and again on a totally irregular, flash-flood kind of basis), he'd invariably blow it on anything and everything that struck his fancy until it was all used up—like he was in some frantic, balls-out race to see just how quickly he could get himself flat broke again. Then he'd be back to his usual old "not liquid" self for as long as it took him to glom on to another pocketload of the old Carrington family cashola. But there was a huge fundamental difference between Cal Carrington and all the other deadbeats I knew in that Cal always felt rich and thought rich, even when he had nothing but lint in his pockets. Maybe that's on account of it was 100 percent cashmere lint.

  Anyhow, I wound up arranging bail for Cal's MG and even managed to borrow the Old Man's tow truck for my date with Julie that Friday evening so's I could haul it. I was supposed to pick Julie up at 7:30, and naturally I had it all timed down to the last split second. I'd figured fifteen minutes to hitch up, ten minutes (tops!) for the tow, and a generous twenty-five minutes to get the MG into my aunt's garage, which, according to my calculations, would've got me up to Julie's front door with an easy forty-five or fifty seconds to spare. Except that I ran into a few, aah, Unforeseen Obstacles along the way (which is always what seems to happen whenever race cars and garages are involved). Like, fr'instance, the Old Man had shoved Mr. Beadle's Oldsmobile 66 into the slot beside Cal's TC, and wouldn't you know it had a busted spring because old Grandma Beadle (who had to be at least a hundred years old and couldn't see as far as the damn hood ornament) ran it over a set of railroad tracks where there wasn't an actual crossing. So now I had two three-legged, ground-gouging automobiles to shove around before I could hitch up the TC. Plus Cal came along to help, and that meant I was spending a lot of time getting cars back up in the air after he'd put his shoulder to it and popped them clear off the jack. He was only trying to help, of course, but brute muscle just doesn't account for much unless you know where and how to apply it, and my buddy Cal was a textbook example of how an inexperienced person—no matter how strong, eager, or willing—could be counted on to get it all wrong and make thing worse instead of easier. As Butch often told me, the mark of a True Mechanic was knowing exactly where and how much of a hit you could give something to bust it loose without breaking it. And my new friend Cal had no idea.

  Then we got to my aunt's house (I was barely a half hour late at that point) only to find there wasn't room for MG in my aunt's garage. In fact, there wasn't room for much of anything in there, on account of she had it piled wall-to-wall with rusty garden tools and old yard furniture and sections of picket fencing that were apparently too beat up to use yet too good to throw away, not to mention fifty or so cardboard boxes filled with moldy, cat turd-decorated books and magazines. I swear, my Aunt Rosamarina must've had every damn issue of Life, Look, Collier's, and National Geographic ever published, along with every coloring book, study text, project folio, and class notebook she'd ever laid a finger on from kindergarten clear through college, all of it covered with a gritty layer of dust and these sad little brown spitballs of spider eggs. I glanced through a few of them, and to tell the truth, it felt kind of creepy, what with the pages all yellow-orange around the edges and smelling like last year's leaves after the snow melts. But the weirdest part was seeing how they didn't have cars or airplanes or anything back when my aunt went to grammar school. Why, I would've been flat out of a job! It made me feel kind of strange inside, you know?

  What with nosing around those old magazines and one thing and another, it was damn near ten before Cal and me got his crippled-up MG squared away in my aunt's garage. But we did it, and that old TC was resting peacefully (if a bit off-plumb) on three flat-spotted tires and a wooden pop crate, surrounded by teetering stacks of yard furniture, garden tools, picket fencing, and book boxes, with just enough space left for a slender human being to walk all the way around it without banging his shins more than twice.

  "Mission accomplished!" Cal grinned, and we shook on it.

  "How 'bout a beer?"

  "You got any?"

  "Does a chicken have lips?"

  "Absolutely!" Cal grinned even broader.

  So we headed up to my apartment for the celebratory beer that absolutely must accompany the completion of every race car project, regardless of how late you may be for any real-life appointment, engagement, or commitment. Like a date with Julie, for example. As we climbed the stairs, I noticed Aunt Rosamarina peering out from behind her flower-print curtains like a cornered ferret (albeit wearing bifocals) and I wondered if she was planning to do or say anything about the chunk of abused English iron we'd just left in her garage. But she never came out, so I figured we were home free. That was a good thing, seeing as how it looked like Cal's old TC might be convalescing for quite a spell.

  I was cleaned up and on my way over to Julie's by 10:35, and, as you can imagine, I couldn't wait to tell her about Cal Carrington and the MG in my aunt's garage and the races out at Bridgehampton. But for some inexplicable reason, Julie seemed more interested in precisely why I was three hours late. Of course, she would soon discover that was about spot-on average for a Race Garage evening, but I recall she was plenty pissed off at the time (not to mention still a little miffed about that wedding in Jersey City). In fact, I remember doing the whole drive over to Weedermen's with my head pulled down inside my collar (tortoise fashion, right?) so as not to get frostbite of the ears.

  But after I bought us a couple double-scoop hot fudge sundaes and casually mentioned Robert Montgomery and Jackie Cooper and Dave Garroway a couple dozen times, Julie started to come around. You know how women
are about movie stars—like some of the glitter maybe rubs off when you actually get to see one in person. You'd think they were baseball players or something, you know?

  Anyhow, Julie's eyes got all bright and sparkly when I told her about all the in-the-flesh celebrities and fancy-pants rich people I'd seen hanging around at Bridgehampton. And right away I started thinking what a swell deal it would be if I could get Julie to come up to the races with me. It's always nicer when you have somebody, you know, special to share the excitement. Especially somebody as easy on the eyes and soft to the touch as Julie Finzio. Besides, according to the S.C.M.A. schedule Cal had tacked to the wall of my aunt's garage, a lot of those races were two-day weekend events, and the idea of getting Julie away someplace where she didn't have to be home by eleven o'clock (or home at all!) had an appeal all its own. In fact, the possibilities alone were enough to put my entire glandular system on red alert. The problem was Julie's mom (what else?), who'd been around the block a few times herself and didn't much fancy any long road trips or overnight lodging arrangements that included her daughter and any male person over the age of six. But every once in awhile, I'd allow myself a little daydream about it, and they inevitably ended with Julie and me waking up together. In the same room. In the same bed. With nothing on but the sheets. Then I'd generally have to go lock myself in the john to think about it some more. . . .